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Boffins Fear We Might Be Running Out of Ideas (theregister.co.uk)
Innovation, fetishized by Silicon Valley companies and celebrated by business boosters, no longer provides the economic jolt it once did. From a report: In order to maintain Moore's Law -- by which transistor density doubles every two years or so -- it now takes 18 times as many scientists as it did in the 1970s. That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago. On an annual basis, research productivity is declining at a rate of about 6.8 percent per year in the semiconductor industry. In other words, we're running out of ideas. That's the conclusion of economic researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a paper published this week through the National Bureau of Economic Research, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?", economics professors Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, and John Van Reenen, and PhD candidate Michael Webb, defy Betteridge's Law of Headlines by concluding that an idea drought has indeed taken hold. "Across a broad range of case studies ... we find that ideas -- and in particular the exponential growth they imply -- are getting harder and harder to find," the authors declare in their paper.
Apple Announces iPhone X With Edge-To-Edge Display, Wireless Charging and No Home Button
Nah, see? We still have plenty of ideas. Oh, wait, you may have meant good ones... OK, that might be a problem. The low-hanging fruit has been already eaten.
Ezekiel 23:20
There's going to be a finite number of practical possibilities; we may actually be close to hitting a wall with regards to finding improved ways to push electrons through transistors. And then there's physics itself - there is an information processing limit based on the universe's physical laws.
That still leaves memristors, photonics, and quantum computing, and there's likely still a corner or two of under-understood physics to find and exploit.
I don't think we've reached the limits yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That means each researcher's output today is 18 times less effective in terms of generating economic value than it was several decades ago.
Assuming that the absolute number of transistors still matters, this math is ridiculous. A doubling of transistor count now means roughly 10 billion new transistors vs. a doubling in the 70s meaning maybe 10,000. So for 18x the headcount you get 1 MILLION times the transistors. A researcher is about 50,000 times more effective than he was in the 70s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This gave me a good chuckle. It's always amusing when people from the left or right try and explain the other side and get it completely wrong.
Newsflash to every extremist on either side: no political ideology is completely wrong or completely right. They all get somethings right and somethings wrong, and the same ideology doesn't always work in every situation and every society.
Get over yourselves. As with most things, the best solution is often somewhere in the between what the extremists from either side espouse. Stop demonizing or regaling people based on their political preferences.
Hey, if I give up my extremist views then the middle will no longer be the middle, it will be somewhere on THEIR side of the line.... No way am I giving up ground to THEM....
At least, that's how I imagine the extremists view things. Being fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I'm fairly close to the center. My problem is that none of the political parties are fiscally conservative. They all want to spend money and are just arguing over the pile...